Speech by Ross Hannaford before his Critters concert on September 29 2015

I just want to say a few things now that I’ve been getting better and I reckon it’s because all the love from everyone.

You may know that I was at Peter MacCallum for an operation on the 28th March 2015. They were expecting a certain kind of cancer but when they opened me up it was something else. I think they put everything out onto some kind of a breadboard (I hope it was a clean breadboard), then they put everything back in and sewed me up. When I woke up I had this big father Christmas belly which I took home. Two days later I had to go back because this belly was like whoa, huge! It’s some kind of liquid part of the blood that (my body) can’t process.

So I said to the doc, well how long does it take to go down?

Doc - Well it’ll never go down…it’ll stay like that till you die.

Hanna – Well when am I going to die?

Doc - Well in a couple of months.

Hanna – Whoa! Ahhh No No No I’m not going to die…

So thanks to alternative medicine and a few things that I’m doing I felt improvement. They were pumping me with morphine, which in the end is just killing you and that’s what they do in hospices. They pump it in until you die.

I came across cannabis oil. That’s medical cannabis oil which has very little THC (psychoactive compound in marijuana) and it was a miracle.

It will be great if they start legalising it. It’s really incredibly humane pain relief. You take it and it doesn’t take long, maybe a couple of minutes and you’re fine again.

Now my stomach’s gone down. I mean I’ve still got something there but it’s gone down a hell of a lot. So far so good! But really the love has been incredible. Thank you so much and thanks for listening.